Miguel Batista is a published poet and novelist--he's also a relief pitcher for the Seattle Mariners. He started his MLB career in 1992 with the Pittsburgh Pirates but hasn't spent that long with any team, nine in total. Overall, he's had a solid career but his performance this season has been uneven. This is what the Red Sox commentators were observing when one of them mentioned that he also wrote poetry. "You don't hear that often. A baseball player who is also a poet. And he's published too." Upon hearing this, my head exploded.
Dominicano por destino, pelotero por profesión, poet por pasión" es una frase que resume la vida de Miguel Batista. Porque para hablar de él hay que viajar un poco más allá de su prestigio como jugador de béisbol y ahondar en sus valores humanos, así como en las miles de páginas en que se revela su vocación por la palabra.
Dominican by birth, pitcher by profession, poet by vocation" sums up Miguel Batista's life in an nutshell. To really understand who he is, you have to dig deeper than his fame as a Major League Baseball player, and get to know his human values. You have to immerse yourself in the thousands of pages he has penned as a poet and novelist, revealing his heartfelt passion for the written word.
Baseball season affords players very little down time. Apparently, Dustin Pedroia and Terry Francona play cribbage before games. A lot of players tune out with video games. Batista writes. His first book--Sentimientos en blanco y negro--slowly came together, in fits and starts:
...pese a su agitada agenda deportiva y aprovechando su escaso tiempo libre, en aviones, en el "clubhouse" o donde fuera, Miguel iba escribiendo en papeles sueltos o libretas, sus sueños, sus dudas, temores y amores.
In spite of his hectic schedule and little free time, Miguel wrote on scraps of paper and notebooks, in the dugout, on airplanes, wherever he happened to be. He wrote about his dreams, his doubts, his fears, his loves. It was 1999, and he never imagined that any of his writings might be published one day.
Something about this process--it's fragmentary quality--reminds me of Marina Tsvetaeva, an early twentieth century Russian poet. I read once how Tsvetaeva would quickly pen a line poetry while making dinner or tending to her daughters. Granted she worked under particularly straitened circumstances, but a number of great poets have juggled writing with full-time careers in other professions--for example, Wallace Stevens (lawyer) and William Carlos Williams (physician).
There are a few poems in Spanish and English on his website. Read them and make your own assessment of his work. What interests me, and what I admire, is that Batista makes time for a creative life. And he doesn't compartmentalize it. It isn't relegated, as it was for Robert Mitchum, to a secret, private practice. It's all there in the open--the good, bad and uneven--"...we kindly/ surrender to the most beautiful feeling/ we have always known" ("Perfect Stranger").
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